When the roll is called up yonder...

What if one day everyone who used to ask you about accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior disappeared? What if this was about the time someone took power and his name was Ann T. Christ? Okay, that would be a pretty feminine name, so let's go with Nicholai Carpathia instead. Welcome to Left Behind. Seems you should have listened to all of your religious friends, because you're living in the "end times," and there is a battle between the forces of the holy and the rock music of the Satanists. Buckle up: Christian gaming just went mainstream.

The game is based on the ultra-popular Left Behind series of books, and the first book is helpfully included in the box with the game. Because I'm a glutton for punishment, I tried to read the book. I thought it would be helpful for me to know the source material for the review, and it might give me a little insight into the series as a whole. I put it down in disgust after the first fifty pages. The writing is just horrible.

The fact that 65 million hojillion people bought these books and enjoyed them scares the hell out of me. When you start longing for the florid prose of a dime-store romance novel, you know that, stylistically, what you're holding in your hands is pretty bad. There is a huge market for it, though, and the concept of the people left behind post-Rapture fighting the forces of evil is actually quite compelling. The idea of putting the concept into a game is a strong one, and there's a lot you can do with the premise.

It's hard to review a game like this without getting into religious issues, but the one thing you'll want to know from the start is that this game is pushing an agenda. It's not as obvious about it as, say, Kirk Cameron; the game doesn't roam the streets telling people they are going to go to hell because they used to make out behind the Pizza Hut when they were 14. But it does have a few things to say about religion.

Between missions, you can look at a "found clue" and read a little essay about the Bible. Some of the historical facts about the Bible I enjoyed reading and they made me want to research the book further out of historical curiosity. There is also an essay that tries to poke holes in the theory of evolution, and while I don't mind how they went about it in this case, the links at the bottom of the page bring you to other Christian sites for further reading. On these pages you're also listening to Christian music, with a helpful "Buy this music now" button at the bottom of the screen.

So you know that this game is definitely trying to say (and sell) something, and for that reason it has a built-in audience. This is a game that Christian parents can buy their kids, and one that Christian kids can play themselves without any guilt about "questionable content." I had a good friend growing up who was Mormon, and since his family was into computers, they had a nice four-computer LAN in their basement, and we would spend many an afternoon playing Duke Nukem with all the nudity and swearing removed. The gunfire, apparently, was okay. In other news, Left Behind has gunfire.

I'm calling the ACLU as we speak

Pre-release media reports have painted the game as one long exercise in violence that includes vitriol against Jews and Muslims, but were they right? While wondering if we're going to disappear in the next few days, let's play some Left Behind and see what kind of a game it really is.